Did Blogs Kill StumbleUpon?
Monday 1 October 2007 - Filed under blog + social media + web
Now, read this post carefully before you go ballistic over the title alone. To my SU friends, please ignore and move on as it doesn’t concern you nor is it about you. Don’t get me wrong, I still love StumbleUpon.
It’s also a boon for smalltime bloggers that holds us through the “dog days” of blog traffic. For small time bloggers it’s hard to keep up quality output or sometimes we let a little time pass before a post or two. At which point, all readers including your mother have moved on to more popular blogs.
Still, I’ve noticed a dramatic decline in the quality of stumbles since bloggers caught on to SU. Every other stumble is a blog. Some of them are lackluster opinion pieces (like this) and others are just spam trash. There used to be a time when SU actually gave me stuff I would never find on my own in a very good way. Now it serves me stuff I would never seek out on my own. It still has its moments occasionally and I’m sure most of the problems are due to bloggers promoting their stuff (which should not affect overall performance ever because we’ll do whatever the rules allow and then some because we DO believe our stuff is good whether others agree or not).
Here’s the button we really need on the toolbar:
I guess it’s easy to maintain quality when you have a relatively small and very passionate user base. Probably why Google stays number 1. They still manage to keep the trash at manageable levels. Whatever they learn about filtering I hope they pass on to Ebay.
2007-10-01 » baron
2 October 2007 @ 12:14 am
Have you tried refining your “stumbles” to a particular category of interest? I’m not seeing that much “crap”, though there is a very large blog component.
Hehe – I like your new button though.
2 October 2007 @ 2:14 am
That is perfect =)
Maybe Digg should get one too
2 October 2007 @ 3:06 am
It’s interesting….you can clearly see the blogger effect on sites like Netscape, er…Propeller. The blog spammers basically destroyed it. On SU on the other hand you can filter out a lot of the junk especially if you use the thumbs down. I don’t get many blog articles that aren’t from friends of mine.
It’s a matter of playing your cards right with setting your interest categories. If they’re too broad, you’re bound to get the junk.
2 October 2007 @ 6:24 am
I agree with you but one way to prevent poor quality content from propagating is using the thumbs down button. If the content is “user filtered” this way, I bet only the best content is truly spread.
5 October 2007 @ 9:09 am
“Won’t StumbleUpon get spammed by people promoting their websites?
No. StumbleUpon recommends pages based on correlation and user clustering, rather than average ratings, so people rating their own sites as ‘I like it!’ cannot spam the database.”
Reference: http://www.stumbleupon.com/help.html#spam
What you often see when you click on the stumble button depends on what your SU friends thumb up or submit. If all your friends are stumblers who love blogs, you’ll inevitably get that filtered into your stumbles when you select the all category.
It’s not about blogs, its about how you use SU.